Recently, we’ve been showcasing some new math features in Wolfram|Alpha, particularly those relevant to primary and secondary school students. Our idea is that when using Wolfram|Alpha, learning math can be a fun experiment. We’d like you to think of Wolfram|Alpha as your own infinitely patient robot, which you can use to explore mathematical ideas, test your knowledge, and generally answer any specific math question you have. More »

Imagine you are building a roller coaster. You need to create a curved shape for the track, which will be designed on a computer before being built out of metal. You want a curve that is fun to travel along, which means you want a lot of sharp curves—but not too sharp, unless you want your amusement park guests to get sick or pass out.

A similar consideration is faced by engineers building a railroad or a highway: you want the path of the road to have curves that are not too sharp—in this case, to prevent the cars or trains from having to slow down (reducing efficiency) or even to wreck. The reason, of course, is that when you travel along a strongly curved section of track or road, you feel an acceleration. The higher the curvature, the stronger the acceleration, all other things being equal. However, the acceleration you feel depends on how fast you are going along the track (the faster you go, the greater the acceleration), while curvature is a property intrinsic to the track itself.More »

It’s usually in precalculus class that students are first exposed to the more exotic and subtle aspects of functions on the real line. This first exposure comes through studying limits and discontinuities.

Most functions that we see every day, from the parabolic arc of a thrown ball to the exponential growth of money in a bank account, are “continuous.” That is, they don’t change their value suddenly. Thought of another way, a continuous function is one you can graph without having to lift your pen up from the paper.

Conversely, a discontinuity of a function is a point where the value of the function experiences a sudden change. In technical language, a discontinuity of a function from reals to reals is a point where either the left- or right-hand limit does not exist, or where these limits exist but aren’t both equal to the value of the function at this point.

Wolfram|Alpha now has the ability to find and analyze the discontinuities of most functions of real numbers. When it comes to such functions, there are three main kinds of discontinuities.

An “infinite” discontinuity is a point where the function increases to infinity and/or decreases to negative infinity (i.e., where it has a vertical asymptote). 1/x is the standard example:

One of the features of calculus is the ability to determine the arc length or surface area of a curve or surface. An arc length is the length of the curve if it were “rectified,” or pulled out into a straight line. You can also think of it as the distance you would travel if you went from one point to another along a curve, rather than directly along a straight line between the points.

To see why this is useful, think of how much cable you would need to hang a suspension bridge. The shape in which a cable hangs by itself is called a “catenary,” but with a flat weight like a roadway hanging from it, it takes the shape of a more familiar curve: a parabola.